Re: [PATCH v7 0/5] Introduce provisioning primitives

Mike Snitzer
2023-05-30T15:28:56Z

On Tue, May 30 2023 at 10:55P -0400,
Joe Thornber <thornber@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 30, 2023 at 3:02 PM Mike Snitzer <snitzer@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> >
> > Also Joe, for you proposed dm-thinp design where you distinquish
> > between "provision" and "reserve": Would it make sense for REQ_META
> > (e.g. all XFS metadata) with REQ_PROVISION to be treated as an
> > LBA-specific hard request? Whereas REQ_PROVISION on its own provides
> > more freedom to just reserve the length of blocks? (e.g. for XFS
> > delalloc where LBA range is unknown, but dm-thinp can be asked to
> > reserve space to accomodate it).
> >
>
> My proposal only involves 'reserve'. Provisioning will be done as part of
> the usual io path.

OK, I think we'd do well to pin down the top-level block interfaces in
question. Because this patchset's block interface patch (2/5) header
says:

"This patch also adds the capability to call fallocate() in mode 0
on block devices, which will send REQ_OP_PROVISION to the block
device for the specified range,"

So it wires up blkdev_fallocate() to call blkdev_issue_provision(). A
user of XFS could then use fallocate() for user data -- which would
cause thinp's reserve to _not_ be used for critical metadata.

The only way to distinquish the caller (between on-behalf of user data
vs XFS metadata) would be REQ_META?

So should dm-thinp have a REQ_META-based distinction? Or just treat
all REQ_OP_PROVISION the same?

Mike